Old Apples never get rotten – instead they run the Web

Apple and the Macintosh computers have a loyal following dating back long before the first iPod ever hit the streets. There are millions of old Macs in circulation, and as would be expected in these days of the internet and tinkering enthusiasts, some of them have ended up as web servers. An old Mac obviously never gets useless.

Why do we care? Because we think it is really cool that these old workhorses are still being put to good use in spite of being, at least in “IT time”, antiques. Some of the ones we found acting as web servers are almost 20 years old.

Old Macs as web servers? How well does that work?

We decided to check how well these old Macs are performing in their new-found role as web servers. You can view the results at a public uptime report page we have created specifically for this purpose. We have added a few already, and plan on adding more over time.

Please note that we have just started, so be sure to come back and check out the statistics over time. We will keep a close eye on the list and blog about the results and if we add more servers.

And yes, we are aware that this can hardly be called a scientific, deeply realistic test, and that there are plenty of other factors involved in regards to the reliability of these web servers, for example what kind of network they are on, what software they are running, and so on. But still, this is nostalgia at its best, meeting the modern web.

Here below is a list of the Mac-hosted websites we have added for uptime monitoring so far. In the spirit of this being mostly about the actual Mac models and not the websites themselves, we have limited it to one website per Mac model in the few cases we found more than one.

Model: PowerBook 540c

Send us tips!

This list is just a starting point. If you have, or know of, more websites hosted on old Macs, please email to apple [at] Pingdom.com. Subject should start with “Mac”.

Looking at these old Mac web servers has been a nostalgic trip down memory lane, and we are looking forward to adding more of them based on your feedback.

Note: We are only testing these servers once every five minutes, and only load the HTML, so it is a very light check. Note also that the response time shown in the reports is the load time of the HTML.